Kansas biologists find ‘super rare’ threatened species in the mouth of a hungry toad KSNT (RK).
11 Extraordinary Sharks That Live in Deep Sea Waters ZME Science
How private equity tangled banks in a web of debt FT. Commentary: Private Equity Puts Debt Everywhere Matt Levine, Bloomberg.
Private Equity Gets Creative to Buy Time for More Gains. Clients Say Pay Me Now Bloomberg
Climate
High Wet Bulb Globe Temperature Danger Arctic News
What It Feels Like When You Have Heatstroke Outside
Trees reveal climate surprise: Microbes living in bark remove methane from the atmosphere Phys.org
Syndemics
2024 Paris Olympics hit by early COVID cases, but organizers don’t seem worried by risk of major outbreak CBS. Commentary:
Aaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhhh!
Four and a half years into this pandemic and the only preventive measure recommended at the already COVID-ridden Olympics is HAND SANITISER.
Hand sanitiser will not stop an airborne virus. https://t.co/8TWKi6bHkG— Trisha Greenhalgh (@trishgreenhalgh) July 24, 2024
More commentary:
Officials Ponder Combining Olympics And Paralympics Simply By Infecting All The Athletes Repeatedly With Covid. pic.twitter.com/oyBuu7MkXy
— The Vertlartnic (@TheVertlartnic) July 24, 2024
China?
China aims to step up Russian energy cooperation despite US sanctions calls South China Morning Post
Sold A False Dream: Inside China’s Derelict Housing Developments China Spotlight
Why Is Bangladesh On The Boil? Free Press Journal
Commentary: Bangladeshi students revolt, but wider movement against the government looks unlikely Channel News Asia
Myanmar
Myanmar Is Running Out of Gas. What Happens Next? The Diplomat
Mourning James C. Scott, a Sterling anarchist and friend of Myanmar Frontier Myanmar
Espionage and Sabotage: The Truth About the Ninja Nippon.com
The Great Game
U.S. military representative will serve as an advisor in Armenia’s Ministry of Defense JAM News
Syraqistan
Highlights: Netanyahu addresses Congress (video) Politico. Commentary:
🧵 Thread – Standing ovation Tracker for Bibi Netanyahu’s address to Congress:
One
— Andy Powlas (@andypowlas) July 24, 2024
Total: 58.
Netanyahu urges unity, but stirs a firestorm inside and outside Capitol The Hill. Commentary:
Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation in the House Chamber today was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.
Many of us who love Israel spent time today listening to Israeli…
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 24, 2024
More Commentary:
Just so we’re clear, Netanyahu has lost so many people that he is addressing just a fraction of Congress.
When this happens, they fill the seats with non-members, like what they do at award ceremonies, in order to project the appearance of full attendance and support. https://t.co/CIboKUrkBq
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 24, 2024
Watergate Hotel sanitized after maggots released to protest Netanyahu stay The Hill. Commentary (2020):
🇮🇱🇺🇸 Did you know that Benjamin Netanyahu actually brings suitcases full of dirty laundry for government staff to clean?
That's one way to assert your dominance I guess… pic.twitter.com/6IU5dTZnNg
— Censored Men (@CensoredMen) July 23, 2024
* * * How Israel is shrinking Gaza’s ‘safe zones’ Al Jazeera
‘Soldiers! Soldiers! Soldiers!’ The Floutist
Gaza as a Blurred, Empty World in an Israeli Reservist’s Paintings Haaretz
* * * An Untold History of Joe Biden’s Support for Israel Branko Marcetic, In These Times
New Not-So-Cold War
Ukraine War Map Shows Two Battalions at Risk of Encirclement: ‘Alarming’ Newsweek
SITREP 7/24/24: General Syrsky Shocks With News of Russian Armor and Troop Surges Simplicius the Thinker
* * * Fitch downgrades Ukraine’s rating to ‘C’ Anadolu Agency
EU discusses indefinite freezing of Russian assets to secure G7 loan for Ukraine Ukrainska Pravda
Ukrainians strip out Tesla batteries to keep the lights on FT
* * * War in Ukraine: Can China use its clout to play peacemaker? Deutsche Welle
What one Moscow square says about Russia’s worsening relations with West BBC
Winds of Change: Ukrainian Politics Reacts to the US Electoral Drama The Wilson Center
* * * Rheinmetall officially receives order from Ukraine to build ammunition factory Ukrainska Pravda
* * * NATO Grapples With a New Long Game Against Putin Foreign Policy
The NATO Declaration and the Deadly Strategy of Neoconservatism Jeffrey Sachs, Common Dreams
Biden Administration
FAA Launches Audit of Southwest Airlines After Close Calls WSJ
2024
Joe Biden says he is ‘passing the torch’ to save US democracy FT
Biden sidesteps hard truths in first speech since quitting race BBC
The Wreckage Biden Leaves Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News
Our Famously Free Press
When mainstream media swallows consultancy garbage Terry’s Substack
Digital Watch
CrowdStrike fiasco highlights growing Sino-Russian tech independence The Register
* * * AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data Nature. From the Abstract: “We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, in which tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as ‘model collapse’ and show that it can occur in LLMs as well as in variational autoencoders (VAEs) and Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). We build theoretical intuition behind the phenomenon and portray its ubiquity among all learned generative models. We demonstrate that it must be taken seriously if we are to sustain the benefits of training from large-scale data scraped from the web.” Autocoprophagy, as I have said since the beginning of the AI bubble.
OpenAI training and inference costs could reach $7bn for 2024, AI startup set to lose $5bn – report Data Center Dynamics
VCs are still pouring billions into generative AI startups Tech Crunch
Boeing
Boeing Gets Flurry of Orders at International Airshow WSJ
Boeing not yet facing clear skies in China even as deliveries resume, executive visits South China Morning Post
US files details of Boeing’s plea deal related to plane crashes. It’s in the hands of a judge now AP
The Final Frontier
Mercury has a layer of diamond 10 miles thick, NASA spacecraft finds Space.com
Supply Chain
Two Swiss lawyers take aim at flags of convenience in new book Splash 247
Groves of Academe
What’s a University Worth? (excerpt) Doomberg
Imperial Collapse Watch
Loss of empire, loss of lucidity Pearls and Irritations
Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fashion
Amazon’s foray into ultra-fast fashion will be a seismic shift in e-commerce Fashion United
Class Warfare
Americans are falling behind on their car payments FOX
39% of Americans worry they can’t pay the bills CNN
The era of privatisation is nearly over. But cleaning up the mess left behind will take years Guardian
At The Money: Behavior Beats Intelligence (transcript) The Big Picture
US markets suffer worst day since 2022 as Tesla and AI stocks fall FT
Antidote du jour (Biscutella):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
152 comments
Comments are closed.
Trump’s too uncouth for the empire
They prefer war sounds sweet, like a church choir
The difference, I guess
Is Trump had a near miss—
He’s now been on the wrong end of gunfire
An old man with orange on his face
Overdue for Death’s gentle embrace
Trump won’t die from a bullet
But a KFC pullet—
That will be his deep-fried coop de grace
Trump is five-foot-ten two-eighty-five pounds
He devours Big Macs, making animal sounds
On his stone epitaph
He will leave us a laugh—
‘Stay one step ahead of the hounds’
Some are intrigued by his wealth
Some by his cunning and stealth
Big Macs and fried chicken
And his fat finger lickin’
Leaves me oh so concerned for his health
JD Vance sees his chance through succession
‘A heartbeat away’ is the expression
Donald lying in state
Well-coiffed and sedate
Means two terms reward JD’s discretion
Thank you.
It is probably a mistake to credit D Party leaders with this much foresight, but it’s an amusing thought that JRB’s infirmities might actually turn out to be politically useful to the Party, inasmuch as they have elicited, prior to JRB’s withdrawal from the 2024 race, a significant amount of negative commentary from DJT which can now be turned against him, since he will be older than JRB now is by the end of a 2025-2029 term.
Perhaps this is a subtext of the apparent irritation that JRB is no longer the top-of-ticket punching bag. “Oh sh!t! Now I’m the oldest candidate in history!”
Probably they don’t think this far ahead and it’s simply a case of moldy lemons turning out to make surprisingly palatable lemonade.
I wonder whether the D Party powers will pressure JRB into taking a comprehensive cognitive assessment (calling DJT’s bluff) and use that as grounds to install Harris as POTUS.
I do think that this kind of assessment is a good idea for POTUS candidates. Perhaps a new normal is in view.
It’s a double edged sword.
Accusations of not being ready to make the hard choices can be levied again Harris as she knew the state Biden was in but said nothing.
Nobody looks good in this morass of compromised politicos.
If we test Presidents for cognition
To see which ones are in poor condition
What Biden was hidin’
While slippin’ and slidin’
Won’t become the next White House tradition
Re What one Moscow square says about Russia’s worsening relations with West BBC
I always have to laugh when I see any post or article from the chief BBC Moscow propagandist Rosenberg. He simply cannot help himself from insisting on putting some anti-Russia, anti-Putin spin on everything. In this instance he mentions Moscow’s Kiev Railway Station, and he has to call it ‘Kyiv Railway Station’. Which it absolutely will not be called in Russia. Bless him. He gets more ridiculous by the day.
Bagdad Bob benefited from a quick collapse.
Clowns like Rosenberg have to keep at it year after year.
Bobs still around, he’s 83. Here’s to long life on the losing side!
As a child studying Ukrainian, when we were writing in English we wrote Kiev and pronounced it in the Anglicized version of the Russian pronunciation, on the basis that this is how it works in English. Kyiv popped up out of nowhere a few years ago, along with journalists mangling that pronunciation just as badly as they mangled Kiev previously.
It’s a sign of a failing political system when the professional busybodies of that country decide it should be their priority to change how English is spoken. “The Ukraine” versus “Ukraine” being another example. So now I make a point of saying “the Ukraine” in front of these people.
Best part of the whole thing is that it’s just different transliteration: it’s really hard to hear the difference in pronunciation.
It is all political positioning stuff. As far as I know it was changed to make the pronunciation more similar to the Ukrainian pronunciation rather than the Russian. This has been done in English certainly not in Spanish where we don’t bother too much with native pronunciations. In Spanish it is still written as Kiev and if we wanted to consider Russian pronunciation we should write it “Kiyev” or “Quiyev” but if we wanted to Ukraine-ize it we should have to change to “Kuyiv” or “Cuyiv” but why bother. It is almost certainly pronounced differently in different Ukrainian regions.
The change in Korean has been stranger still: it is now Ki-i-pu, rather than Ki-e-pu. Not really easy transliteration into Korean to begin with and both involve much butchering of hte original anyways. I always thought the important thing is where the accent is placed rather than actual pronunciation (am I wrong about this?), and this is not something that gets done well in some languages…
Nah. Neither where the accent is placed, nor actual pronunciation is an important thing. In Europe, it is common that city/region/country have more or less different names in different languages. For example Hungarians call their country Magyarország. Others call it Hungría, Ungaria, Ungarn, Vengria, Hungorska, Madzarsko, Madzarska, Madyarska, and anything but what Hungarians do. No one is even trying to call it the way they call it, and that is normal. Orban doesn’t care. What’s not normal, is the recent Turkiyeye thing. I can not understand why would anyone want to kiss up Sultan’s rear end, and go along with it.
This whole Ukranization-of-names-thing is collective IQ test, and the western part of humanity is failing miserably, just like with genders-pronouns-whatever.
P.S. Long time ago, I’ve spent some time with some South Korean students on some exchange program. The first thing I did is gave them local nicknames, because I just could not rememember nor pronounce their real names. :)
South Koreans have gotten the “correct name” thing worse than many people, I think, ovee last 20-30 years. One of my pet peeves is the way they insist on calling Chinese people and place names by mangled approximation of Mandarin names, insisting that that’s “the correct” pronunciations. The Chinese themselves tend to be much more lax about it: for all intents and purposes, China is a multilingual country where many minority languages and dialects have their own terminologies. And one of these official minority languages is Korean itself, so you get strange instances where official Chinese govt publications (published in Korean) refer to persons and places by their traditional Korean names, but Soith Kirean media insists on calling them by butchered approximations of Mandarin pronunciations….
There was that long war over Wilno/Vilna/Vilnius, etc. I syppose the Lithuanians do have a bit of issue on this topoc, too…
I was pretty amused when Turin insisted on being called Torino during the olympics some time ago.
The scoundrels have even taken it to one of my favorite old school Russian dishes, Chicken Kiev.
Wikipedia is a battleground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev
I mean really, where is it “also known as chicken kyiv”? In the State Department cantine? smh
Gah. That was a close second to chicken supreme (by “Vesta”) in 1970s Britain and something us Gen X latchkey kids could be trusted to cook for ourselves when parents were not yet home and on the 3-4 days a week when we had power.
The good old days which we seem destined to revisit! ;-)
(I won’t be passing on my genes so don’t GAF about what atrocities these meals are doing to my bits. Damage was done during childhood and via epigenetics via the Fray Bentos Pies etc that Dad ate before me!
Wikipedia is not a battleground, but a propaganda outlet of the “Collective West”. It was always full of crap, and is only getting worse.
The media is too lazy to use “the” in front. Just like Sudan instead of the Sudan.
Nope. The media got written instructions not to use the “the”. Not joking. I saw table with wrong and right terms & expressions sent to a TV station. It contained “unprovoked Russian aggression” and all the other common expressions used by MSM. The comical thing is that the list was in English, and the TV station is not. The “the” thing is English specific and makes no sense in languages that do not have the “the” equivalent at all. Ukraine in the brain is a mental condition.
Can’t remember which Ukrainian maybe a decade ago said calling it ‘the’ Ukraine was racist. So watch it.
Those wannabe arians are touchy about racial things, because they constantly lose wars to lesser race that they want to divorce themselves from.
For what it is worth, about 7 years ago (long before the war), my daughter dated a man of Ukrainian decent – was in his early 20s, immigrated to US maybe 10 years earlier. Anyway, he taught us to say “Ukraine”, not “the Ukraine”… he said he never knew why we add the “the”. We don’t say “the France” or “the Italy”… only add “the” when referring to collection “the USA”, “the USSR”, etc.
There are many stories about the “the”, but the one I find most believable is that when “Ukraine” as a name for an geographical area appeared in the mid 19th century, the area was not well defined at all.
It was more of a concept, thus in Russian/Ukrainian people would use “na Ukraine” (on Ukraine) instead of “v Ukraine” (in Ukraine). And in English it would be more natural to use “the Ukraine”, like the Nederlands or the Caucasus.
Nowadays some people day using “the Ukraine” denies Ukrainian sovereignty, while it actually just refers to the fact we’ve learned from 10 years of civil war, that Ukraine is still trying to find what it actually is…
The Ukraine means that it’s Russian borderland (which is what the name means), and not a real country. That’s why they hate it so much. There have been many Slavic borderlands troughout history (Krajina/Krayina being the more common version of the name), and they want to make themselves unique and non Russian/Slavic.
He never heard of the Netherlands, the Philippines, and most of all, the United States, I gather?
If the English choose to call a college Mordlin (or Maudlin) but spell it Magdalen (in Oxford) or Magdalene (in Cambidge) that’s up to them, just as it is entirely up to the Russians what they call their railway stations, and decide to spell it.
Anyone who decides to call it Mordlin College is a fool and looks it.
Actually the pronunciation is different: in Oxford it’s pronounced “Maudlin”, in Cambridge it’s pronounced “Magdalyn”.
I’d reject your thesis as English is not a language with fixed spelling conventions. See for example the many ways “-ough” can sound. Or the posh way to pronounce the name Featherstone. No particular form of English is “correct”.
I pronounce it Maudlin, being from near Oxford. I do not believe myself to be a fool.
I always got a kick out of Leghorn (pronounced Liforn, ie Livorno) myself.
Incidentally, many Chinese maps show Phoenix, AZ, as 凤凰城 (Fenghuang City–Fenghuang is a mythological bird that’s kind of like the Occidental phoenix). I suppose the bottom line is that thinking that there’s a “correct” name for a place in foreign languages gets to be silly….
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/舊金山#Chinese
Another example — 舊金山 (Jiùjīnshān), the Chinese name for San Francisco, literally means “Old Gold Mountain.”
Must have been a slow news day for the BBC’s Moscow bureau (which I suppose is a good thing), so Rosenberg scraped the bottom of his creativity barrel to come up with something to submit to London Central before the deadline.
Many “squares” in Moscow aren’t actually confined geographical spaces in the sense of Red Square, Place de la Concorde, El Zocalo, etc. They’re often just traffic intersections that some politicians or city planners decided to grace with a title. Nobody refers to them by these artificial names.
Despite many years living in Moscow, I had no idea that the traffic conurbation by Kiev train station and the Radisson Slavyanskaya was named Europe Square. I had to look it up. It’s a totally artificial name. I doubt any taxi driver would recognize it, and the locals wouldn’t use it for directional purposes.
Just down the street from our Moscow apartment, there is a big traffic intersection with the fancy official name of “Martin Luther King Square”. Only after 10+ years did I accidentally discover that this place had a name. When I asked my wife (who has lived there most of her life), even she had no idea. Neither did our offspring (even though they use the metro station there regularly). I don’t think most Russians care two figs about silly naming issues like this.
I wonder if there is Martin Luther King Square in Washington D.C.
>>>>Joe Biden says he is ‘passing the torch’ to save US democracy FT
I totally forgot that Biden campaigned for singe-payer health care in the 2020 primaries.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/policy-2020/medicare-for-all/
I wonder if part of the DNC consultancy blob realizes that they bait-switched voters so many times on policy that that only have the “save Democracy” and a few culture war cards left.
…so Kamala isn’t even going to bother feigning interest in health care.
One of Fox News’s attacks on Harris is that she co-sponsored a single payer bill back in the day. I’d count that in her favor except oops, it was apparently performative.
The saving Democracy thing is evermore threadbare. At some point even the most rah rah not in the inner circle is going to recognize that the Democratic Party actively limits voter choice.
They are saving rights of minors to get sex change, abortion to term, and right to censor/gaslight anybody that don’t agree.
The saving “ our “democracy is more like what Mao’s Red Guard might force.
>The saving “ our “democracy is more like what Mao’s Red Guard might force.
If only. Come back, Mao. The world needs you.
Your link says he “prefers a public option.” That isn’t Medicare for All.
As we learned in 2009 the “public option” is a proposal to deflect attention from M4A and to preserve private for-profit insurance.
In 2020 when asked if he would sign a M4A bill if it somehow got through Congress his response was blah-blah-blah reasons why that was unlikely.
Link
It was worse than that. Back in 2020, he all but said that he would veto a M4A bill if it ever “by some miracle” came to his desk. See: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/10/biden-says-he-wouldd-veto-medicare-for-all-as-coronavirus-focuses-attention-on-health.html – Pepperidge Farm remembers…
In fact, I personally seem to recollect he actually said he’d veto it in one of the debates, but that kind of a quote requires more effort to chase down. And notice in that CNBC article his opposition is built around the “cost”, as in, quote, “where are you going to find $35 trillion”. Which was the main attack line of mainstream Democrats, “how’re you going to pay for it”, and that one was definitely used in the primary debates. Generating endless rebuttals on “progressive” Youtube channels, for all the good that did. It’s a mindbogglingly stupid attack line, of course, but certainly worked on the PMCs in the room.
Point is, Biden, Klobuchar, all those “mainstream” candidates, they never even pretended during the primaries, they were dead against M4A or anything close to it. Kamala, at least, did a yo-yo deal where she raised her hand in favour of M4A in an early debate, then walked it back in interviews the next day. Meaning, she just wanted votes, and was willing to say anything in the moment to try and get them. In this sense, Biden was, ironically, the more principled one during the primaries (aside from lying a lot, as in his one on one debate vs Sanders).
I did attempt to “chase it down” and provided the same link you did.
Ever the copycat, Biden could not even use original language. JFK said “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by ..”
I hope the Democrat torch will burn the whole party down.
>Biden sidesteps hard truths in first speech since quitting race BBC
While he said his accomplishments, which he listed in detail, merited a second term in office, he added that “nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy – and that includes personal ambition.”
There is an excellent summary of Jacques Ellul’s political philosophy at the link below. In it, it states that Democracy is an illusion, and until it is recognized as such, that the reality of “democracy,” in a technological modern society, a mass society, is impossible. Nothing will improve the conditions of the masses as long as this illusion holds sway. He points out that the more politicians talk about “democracy” and “saving” it, the more distance in realty are the conditions which would allow it to become possible.
Summary of The Political Illusion by Jacques Ellul
https://youtu.be/69svN4b4cW0?si=EmwRTSzqOetu240A
Thanks. Nice podcast, but I don’t have patience for lectures. This link seems to make similar points in print:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-11-16/jacques-ellul-a-prophet-for-our-tech-saturated-times/
Sounds good: Ellul as McLuhan before McLuhan. But for me the defining ‘technology’ of H. sapiens is language. Maybe Ellul makes that connection somewhere. His language-propaganda association is promising and ahead of his time (if not ahead of Orwell and others). so I’ll read more Elull.
Excellent article, archived. Thank you.
I see private equity is taking a well deserved beating here this morning.
>39% of Americans worry they can’t pay the bills CNN
As a result of current economic conditions, most Americans say they’ve had to cut back on spending on extras and entertainment (69%) and changed their grocery buying (68%), according to the CNN poll.
Yesterday when I went to buy some creamer for my coffee, the price of the one that doesn’t have a paragraph of ingredients was north of $6.00. I can afford it, but I didn’t buy it.
Some prices are now so high that I’ve changed my buying habits. Maybe it’s being raised in a household where there wasn’t much discretionary income. Some grocery items are so high that I refuse to buy them. I drank my coffee black in the past, and I drank it black this morning. I’m curious what the producers of some of these items are going to do when people just stop buying them.
The grocery chains are well aware this is happening, and they are responding. Some prices which were jacked up too far too fast have already started coming down.
In other cases, their solution is the usual tactic, to force you to buy more than you want. Major potato chips came down to 2 for $6 instead of 6 for one bag, because people were walking away. They still insist on getting $6 from you, which if you do that leaves less cash for other inflated goods in the store. I chose 0 for $0, like you did.
And their favorite new trick is to offer great deals to people who agree to walk around the store using their phone app. A lot of young people are broke enough and submissive enough to agree to this.
Hmm, chains here post “2 for $6″(yes sometimes requiring use of data-sucking store card/app), but when you buy 1 only it rings up as $3.
I see 1 bag of chips for 6, but if you buy 5 bags they are 3, but you must buy 5 bags…that says people are not buying to me…I like the occasional chip but no can do.
Funny in a way because these buy 5 to get a deal are for discretionary things that are often the processed foods no one should buy !2 bucks for a 14 ounces of frozen pizza? I think I’ll have a steak instead, thanks.
“I think I’ll have a steak instead, thanks.”
First, you’ll have to ‘rustle’ the steer.
Seriously, I wonder what the data on cattle rustling is like today? It’s just shoplifting with “cutting out” the middleman.
Yes, sometimes that is the case. And sometimes it is not, and you get a nasty surprise at the checkout; oh, that’s $4.59 if you’re only getting one. They coach you to relax and assume you will always get the same price if you just get one. Another tactic. All about raising the total amount you spend at checkout.
Depends on stores. It seems 2 for 6 (4 bucks each if you buy just one–in fine print) is fairly common.
Food prices aren’t dropping at all. Maybe a repackaged product, smaller of course, will be priced slightly lower or remain the same but this whole notion of moderating inflation is bunk. People by groceries every week, they don’t buy appliances or electronics on a regular basis so they won’t see the slight drop in prices assigned to those products.
Btw–that $6 natural creamer is easy to create: 20oz half/half, 1-1.25 cups sugar, 1/2 cup water, and 2 tbl vanilla extract. The recipe is easily searched online. I can attest to its tastiness.
“Yesterday when I went to buy some creamer for my coffee, the price of the one that doesn’t have a paragraph of ingredients was north of $6.00. ”
I checked Walmart’s website and a big bag (39.5 oz) of dry whole milk (Walmart brand) is $13.12. The only ingredients are dry whole milk, vitamin A palmitate, and D3. I wonder if that would be a good substitute for creamer; a bag that size should last forever (you could freeze part of it). You could even mix in sugar or flavorings.
Olympics and COVID, say it ain’t so. My god these people either highly naive or just don’t give a sh*t as long as they can it was a success. Which they will regardless.
Just look at what happened with the Tour de France. COVID was everywhere. Riders started to mask again, to protect themselves, even before they reimposed pretty weak masking rules. At the Tour is outside.
Anyone wanna bet that athletes will get it, spread it, drop out, etc.?
Citius, Altius, Fortius, Infectus
Success of an olympics is measured in the velocity of money and the speed of filling coffers of insiders.
IOC have at least 70 words for money.
I will be tempted to watch some track and field events but hopefully my decision to not watch, a small and insignificant boycott as it were, will hold. I admire fine athletes but sorry guys and gals, the Olympics is a fraud and has been for a long time.
In the winter Olympics, its pretty much all about sticking the landing and i’m sure a lot of that goes on in the Olympic Village in indoor mixed double competition in the summer games, but it only seems to matter in gymnastics, diving and javelin events.
The BBC did a program about exactly that back in 1968.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Sex_Olympics
The joke at my school was that was a porno and people got disappointed when discovering it wasn’t.
When we never realised that “mahna mahna” in the very first episode of the Muppet Show was a song that genuinely came from a Swedish soft-core porn film.
As if Nigel Kneale would stoop that low. (Although he did use the “theory” that Terran humans are an “engineered” species in his teleplay “Quatermass and the Pit,” back in 1967, the year before the year of the Sex Olympics.)
Now I feel compelled to try and find that Swedish soft core film, just to hear the original version of the song, of course.
Ouch! I find out that the ‘Swedish’ film is an Italian “mondo” film called “Sweden: Heaven and H—.”
Ye original, safe for work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTKs0-UPguA&ab_channel=CapriShowWorld%5BCapriShowWorld.com%5D
We KNEW the Muppets were subserversive right back in the 70s……we just didn’t realise quite how much!
It’s like the “anti-woke” YouTubers who rage that a “proper” He-Man still can’t be made. I just laugh and say to myself “have you SEEN that meme of He-Man and Liono from Thundercats in their so obviously homoerotic gear, plus a bunch of characters from the former which, unlike Captain Pugwash, WERE actually well dodgy”?
Even as a kid I spotted it all. And now I laugh hollowly at the idiots, thinking, actually the late 70s/80s rocked.
I used to watch The Muppets on Sesame Street in the early days. The Henson crew threw a lot of “adult” humour into the mix. Oh, the Cookie Monster was good for a giggle whenever he showed up. (The time CM slid up to a little girl Girlscout muppet, leered at her and asked, “You got cookie for me?”) Or all of the vampire jokes at the expense of “The Count.” After the “Credentialed Educators” gained the upper hand in the writing and production of Sesame Street, the joy died.
As for the costume designs of the Saturday Morning cartoons, well, let us describe it as the Marquis De Sade meets Man Ray., with a little Tom of Finland thrown in for balance. (Man at Arms from He Man would definitely qualify as a Tom of Finland type.)
“mahna mahna” in the very first episode of the Muppet Show was a song that genuinely came from a Swedish soft-core porn film.
Did it really? I knew it as an old French song (with some weakly lascivious undertones) by Henri Salvador called “mais non, mais non” — “mahna mahna” is a distorted pronunciation thereof.
The text can be found here, its interpretation is easily found on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXo1ufdQ4sg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden:_Heaven_and_Hell
My view of the olympic movement is colored by two events.
In 1936, a 4 gold medal winner Jesse Owens was told to stay in Europe to do exhibitions. Instead, he headed back to the USA and US Olympic officials banned him from amateur events in the future .
In 1968 black power symbol athletes Tommie smith and john Carlos were also banned from future competition.
exactly what law did Owens, smith, Carlos break?
Fraud is a good summary.
I am boycotting the Olympics entirely. With Russia banned and Putin with an arrest warrant for in fact saving children’s lives while Israel is allowed while IOF having killed tens of thousands of children and Bibi still scot free, I resent to provide the time for it. And respect any of the participants for condoning the current state of affairs.
It’s a world of slaughter
A world of tears
It’s a world of hopes
And a world of fears
There’s so much that we’d rather not share
That it’s time we’re aware
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small, small country
There is just one chosen people who loom
They need more living room
And a Merkava means
Foreclosure to ev’ryone
Though the dogma divide
And to think we could live by the tide
Instead of side by side
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small country after all
It’s a small, small country
Given the music from Queen a spin this morning, whilst I file my daily TPS reports…all in the name of putting forth my effort for the good of humanity of course. If I don’t fulfill my daily tasks and deliverables, will anyone actually notice? Eh, probably not for one day…but I digress.
Their tune for Under Pressure could really be an applicable track for our modern America and an election year that presents varied but bleak options. Biden vs Trump! Eh just a sec…Harris ( presumed ) vs Trump. “Our Democracy!” Vs. “Orange Man + MAGA”!!
Bowie and Freddy were very politically aware and that song remains radical. At the time it seemed an odd collaboration but it has aged remarkably well.
Patrick Lawrence, the Wreckage Biden Leaves. I recommend this article to you, brethren and sistren. It may seem like doom and gloom, but it is lucid and well argued. Now, it may be that Lawrence can more easily pile up the record of Biden’s personal and political failures than find something to praise him for. Biden as a moral disaster is easy pickings. And we can all say nice things at the wake.
Being a writer of wide culture, Lawrence makes these insights: “Biden took office four Januarys ago — remember the inauguration, with that dreadful poet and Garth Brooks bursting out of his jeans? — droning on and on about his dedication to national unity. Forget it. That was one of his more outsized Bidenisms. Joe Biden has put this nation so at odds with itself that he and his flaks have resorted to blaming it on the Russians, the Chinese and lately even the Iranians.”
And he is right, down to the hysteria about the Iranians and the sermonizing poetaster. (I don’t want to crap on another writer, but have you noticed her disappearance?)
Like alpha lyman blob, I do not eat popcorn. And I will defer by not passing the vitello tonnato today.
Pass the dakos!
I concur that is a must read and thankful he keeps it fairly tight, a nice summation of the Biden legacy. Many voters would find something to trifle with I’m certain. Look at his Cabinet, so diverse and reflection of America today….yeah about Pete Buttigieg or Secretary Mayorkas, just two examples where measured incompetence does not appear a deterrent in their ongoing roles. At times the sheer idiocy of the Biden administration public statements of policy wins and a great man legacy from the media are just overwhelming in the blind cheering. I’ll concede lowering the price level of insulin is a worthwhile effort. Or the proverbial or supposed fight against monopoly as well.
I’ll take a beer and some potato chips…if those items are available on a sale price for a comparative bargain of course.
Two for six bucks on the chips for sure, goes great with slug trap (cheap) beer, seventeen American dollars gets you thirty 12 oz champagne of regrets, and 30 beers it is because this matinee goes on and on.
What? You a Certified Peem and you drink a product of Deplorable Breweries?
Lawrence is good as usual, and I watched a shortish video from Dr. Wolff about the four main tasks facing a President Harris.
See, (10 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXRx50uNpo4&ab_channel=RichardDWolff
Thanks. Cued up for my next break.
Remind which beer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one.
Edit, I was humming the jingle and realized I left out a word
Shaefer! Get a grip.
Vitello tonnato. This is something I will try to prepare this summer for the first time. With salad as a side, i think. One made with lettuce, apple slices and possibly with nuts and the same “tonnato” thing as dressing.
Ignacio: The secret is to slice the veal very thin. And one or two caper leaves–which are readily available in Spain–as garnish. The caper balances the richness of the dish with its tartness.
Capers leaves, not seeds. That is interesting. As those conserved in olive oil i guess.
Aha.
Private equity. Greed is good.
Gecko (although an awfully cute one from Crete)
Subtle.
I shed crocodile tears whilst playing a tiny violin for the greedy bastards of private equity. They’re only smart from all the winning, just always winning, but their loss* column only appears to be vacant, since we’re aware that any loss hits someone else (limited partners, pension plans) or the bankruptcy courts.
The economic pain of any past, present or future loss is due to unforeseen changes in the economy or in government policy. Nevermind a stacked deck, that typically features heavy fees ( oversight , management, bonuses ) plus newly generated debts.
Any plebe with backing can make money during ZIRP. Smart might be “smartly attired” or “smart ass” but not smart enough to realize an exit plan at five percent.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-legacy-of-the-clinton-bubble
———————————————
what good are hedge funds? In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the National Securities Markets Improvement Act (NSMIA), also known as the hedge fund protection act which overhauled state and federal responsibility for securities market oversight. It was part of a series of market deregulations in the Clinton era, advanced with broad Wall Street support and almost no resistance in Congress
—————————–
as i correctly predicted, bill clintons disastrous polices of free trade, deregulation, and privatization, means parasites manipulate every thing you do, everything you buy, everything you touch and use, every where you go.
we cannot recover, till bill clintons disastrous polices have been reversed.
http://prospect.org/article/what-good-are-hedge-funds
What Good Are Hedge Funds?
Hedge funds make big returns by manipulating markets in ways that are illegal for small investors. Remind us: Why are they permitted?
David Dayen
April 25, 2016
Would have been the final zinger if the gecko were Scottish… Are there geckos in Scotland?
Not that I know of. But there are a lot of Geordies! (Geordie Gecko? The Faol of Exchange Alley?)
Watching Netanyahu’s spiel to Congress yesterday, I was struck by the p-r-o-l-o-n-g-e-d applause, which reminded me of a story about how the first person to stop clapping at one of Stalin’s speeches was taken out and shot … “pour encourager les autres“. In the case of Netanyahu’s speech, the first CongressCritters™ to stop applauding might have put themselves at risk for being kicked off the AIPAC Gravy Train™.
The US Congress won the Olympic Gold Medal in Brown Nosing. Or is their discipline Lobby Transaction Processing?
Simply notice that the emperor’s new clothes are his skivvies and he is trimmed to his true dimensions. I know. I know. Money.Votes. AIPAC. Congress critters are essentially herd beasts. Sheeple. Supporting Israel does not mean approval of each and every action, each and every attitude. I saw this morning that as a courtesy visiting dignitaries have their clothes cleaned. Can it be true that Bibi and wife always bring suitcases full of dirty clothes? Would that not be an extreme of passive aggression? Your host is fit only to wash your dirty socks? But then Bibi appears to be that arrogant at the best of times.
This thing with the laundry is interesting. I took it in the context of Netanyahu’s routine throwing of insults at Biden and Biden just taking it. Actually bothering to transport loads clothing across an ocean plus a sea for the White House to wash, dry, press and fold, and transporting it back to Israel and seeing to it that the press knows about it strikes me as … showing who’s boss. And Biden just takes.
I’d expect Drunk Auntie Kam and Vance would be the same but I’m not so sure about Trump.
>>>… showing who’s boss.
Really? To me, it makes the man look so petty and small while being unworthy of his office.
It’s equivalent to Bibi telling Joey to lie on the floor and to wipe his shoes on his sirt and jacket. Petty? Sure. And humiliating for Joey, the federal government and all Americans. The more petty and ritualized, the more humiliating.
They replaced the 130 missing Democrats from the Chamber with stand ins. These were chosen for their jumping and shouting ability.
I was thinking they filled the empty chairs with real estate developers.
Well, this being Congress… could it have been a Dime Share presentation?
More like a Dime Bag transaction.
All the attendees need that ‘fix’ dontcha know.
Maybe they filled it with empty suits.
Probably just invited all the J Street lobby.
NATO Grapples With a New Long Game Against Putin Foreign Policy
Anyone remember the Original Star Trek episode when, while traveling in deep space, the Enterprise enters a black floating blob? Upon entering, the blob begins sucking the energy out of every living and mechanical thing as it pulls it in closer to it’s center. And…the more they try reverse thrusters to get out, the greater and faster the pull towards the center becomes, and the faster they are drained of energy?
Then someone suggest a different approach – use their engines to thrust TOWARDS the center. And it works – they begin to slow the march towards the center, and the drain on their energy slows.
Every leader in The West might benefit from watching that Star Trek episode.
NATO Grapples With a New Long Game Against Putin…
Again, thank you for the important comments about the increased estimate of Russian GDP by the World Bank. The estimate makes sense and I expect the IMF will agree. The point, however, is that Russian economic productivity has been significantly underestimated by G7 countries.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD
April 15, 2024
Gross Domestic Product based on purchasing-power-parity (PPP) for Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Macao, Russia, United Kingdom and United States
2023
China ( 35,263)
United States ( 27,361)
India ( 14,537)
Russia ( 6,452)
Japan ( 6,251)
Germany ( 5,858)
Brazil ( 4,455)
Indonesia ( 4,333)
France ( 4,169)
United Kingdom ( 4,026)
Had Hiroshima-like mushrooms yesterday afternoon over the High Sierra, and it seemed as if all hell was gonna break loose, so my buddy and I turned into Cloudchasers headed east into Sequoia NP, and by the time we got to Giant Forest, they’d mostly dissipated into the ether.
I’ll grant that it isn’t the same gig as chasing tornadoes as all the action is turned around in that instead of coming down, massive columns of cloud reached 15,000 to 20,000 feet in the air.
Have you played with Zoom Earth? Not as exciting as actual cloud chasing, but you can get near real time satellite data from home. The resolution is not that great as it seems fires in my area have to get to be about 10 acres (~ 4 hectares) before they are visible.
For example: https://zoom.earth/maps/satellite/#view=43.4151,-121.92698,8.68z/overlays=heat,fires
I’ve checked the Meron air control base for missile damage, but they don’t seem to update it frequently enough. I think this is the residential base where the soldiers from the main base stay when they are not on duty.
In some silviculture and forest dynamics manual of yesteryear I remember reading that big forest fires, especially in the north, could reach the energy (equivalent not intensity) of nuclear bombs…
>Trump shooter studied JFK assassination – FBI
Thomas Michael Crooks also managed to fly a drone around the rally site without being detected, Christopher Wray told Congress…
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Wray said that an FBI examination of Crooks’ computer revealed that he began researching the JFK assassination on July 6, the same day he registered to attend the Trump rally.
“He did a Google search for – quote – ‘how far away was Oswald from Kennedy’,” Wray said, referring to Lee Harvey Oswald, the gunman accused of shooting Kennedy in 1963.
You have to appreciate Chutzpah of the FBI linking Crooks with Oswald, two lone gun men…yeah.
https://www.rt.com/news/601609-trump-shooter-jfk-fbi/
I guess the FBI hues to the official account like so many other implausible official narratives we hear almost daily. So yeah, two gun men acting alone.
In considering Crooks’ motives, I have to assume, unlike Oswald, suicide was one. Matt Farwell talks and writes about suicide by cop being a frequent choice of method among former service men. Crooks wasn’t in the services ofc but it does seem like a suicide by cop, among other things.
If Crooks flew the drone without being detected, then how does Wray know it happened?!?!??
And why should we believe anything the spooks say?
Is the Crooks computer being held in the same lab as the Hunter Biden one?
Very close. I’ve been to the Texas School Book Depository, and it’s amazing how close it is.
Our dad offered us each a grandido circa 1972 if we won an Olympic gold medal, and needless to say none of us collected the moolah, although I went to high school with somebody a grade higher who won an Olympic gold medal in Montreal when she was 16, as an honorable mention.
Fast forward to the mid 1980’s and I was at an auction in London and was the successful bidder on a 1908 London Olympics gold medal (18k, not the gold-plated junk they give out nowadays) that was awarded for pigeon shooting. (I sincerely hope said pigeons were of the clay variety)
I got home and drove over to my parents house and practically demanded the thousand bucks from Daddy Warbucks, but it was a no go, as I tested positive for cannabis.
Shirley Babashoff
Went to Fountain Valley myself, back in the day
I wouldn’t claim that Jill Sterkel looked manly like say an East German distaff swimmer in 1976, but she was certainly no shrinking violet.
I raced against Dan Simoneau back in high school. That boy won all the (cross country ski) races by irrationally large times/distances. His best Olympic finish was eighth.
Probably “missed” the wax prep for the conditions ;)
Lol! Dude would win a 20 minute race by two minutes, an unreasonable beating by any standard. And we had horses.
No one tried Math, or Chemistry, or Physics as a field?
>Branko Marcetic – An Untold History of Joe Biden’s Support for Israel
A worthwhile survey, I would add to his account of old dreadful Joe in his support for the brutal 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (a holocaust using Reagan’s own term).
Jeremy Scahill April 27, 2021: [emphasis added]
1982: Israeli Invasion of Lebanon
…
Doubly ironic, no? In 2018 Israeli snipers shot children in the knees, now they shoot them in the head. Biden got what he wanted after all.
The title should say:
Armenia’s Ministry of Defense will serve U.S. military representative.
P.S. Link is not working properly because of “\” at its end.
Same issue with the Heatstroke link
Yves, how is this not a Ponzi scheme? As I understand the term, new money pays off old, but this Bloomberg article describes PE doing exactly this; shuttling around debts to sell for meeting new obligations! What am I missing? Who regulates PE? What protections do investors have, lawsuits and futile attempts to recover from modern day incarnation of three-card monte?
This is referred to as locking in investors by denying them the ability to redeem. My experience with this is from the world of hedge funds and is dated. In my day, terms of investment included language that allowed the investment manager to put off redemptions if such redemptions would affect the market and fellow fund investors in a negative fashion. This clause was ripe for abuse, and abused it was.
Two years. 😁
A Belgium visitor walking into the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park severely burned his feet when he lost his shoes, according to a park release.
While the air temperature when the unidentified man headed into the dunes last weekend was around 123° Fahrenheit, park staff said “the ground temperature would have been much hotter…”
According to the release, the man had to be rescued “after suffering full-thickness burns on his feet.”
The man’s family called for help and recruited other park visitors who carried the man to the parking lot.
Park rangers determined the man needed to be transported to a hospital quickly due to his burns and pain level. Mercy Air’s helicopter was not able to safely land in Death Valley due to extreme temperatures, which reduce rotor lift. Park rangers transported the man in an ambulance to a landing zone at higher elevation, where the temperature was 109°F, and the man was flown to University Medical Center in Las Vegas.
Rangers were not able to determine if his flip flops broke or were lost in sand.
https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2024/07/hot-sand-burns-mans-feet-death-valley-national-park
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Shoe Is The Sign from Life of Brian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka9mfZbTFbk
Once he heals he’ll travel to Yellowstone to get a close up selfie with a bison.
The man was walking around Death Valley wearing flip-flops during the summer? What an idiot.
In Manchester he would have got frostbite.
I had a colleague and friend that served his military service in Algeria in the Sahara, close to the southern border. He recounted how the bedu walk barefoot, with a 2 cm calus on the sole of their feet…
> Rheinmetall officially receives order from Ukraine to build ammunition factory Ukrainska Pravda
I assume RF can, if it chooses, prevent production from the factory. So what is this? More transfers of money to Western arms makers?
We know that sending military equipment to be destroyed in UA serves that purpose because US politicians boast about it so it doesn’t seem a stretch that this is the same kind of thing.
This is rich. After calling for Trump to be banned from social media and cheering when twitter gave him the boot, Jerry Nadler and other members of the Democrat party are now very concerned that X might be somehow limiting Kamala’s account – https://www.yahoo.com/news/nadler-urges-republicans-investigate-xs-200641079.html
“AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data ”
Cognitive Incest?
Haha. To someone like me, the conclusion seemed patently obvious and a “duh!” moment. However, I am aware I am part of the “old school” where you absolutely did not train your model to “go looking where you expected, and where there were already some hills in the likelihood function”.
People like me deliberately used what is admittedly a rather inefficient orthogonal approach that essentially looked “all over the x,y axis” (or 3D+ in higher dimensional space). I am always at pains to stress that Bayesian approaches and those trained on data you know to “encompass all logical space” will be faster and better. However, the health economists even back in 2001 when Empirical Bayesian methods were rapidly coming to displace classical methods began to notice oddities and the “get out of jail free card” of the “use a flat prior” began to raise the suspicions of people like me.
If you train your AI on what’s already commonly out there I fail to see how it can possibly predict with reliability and it will almost certainly kill or ignore all the black swans.
Loss of empire, loss of lucidity – Pearls and
“The afflicted appear locked into a narrow ideology which leaves little room to adapt their perspective to a rapidly evolving international system…”
39% of Americans can’t pay their bills. That’s a persepctive.
And the exact nature of an “evolving international system” remains to be seen.
…eine kleine morning music…
Dvořák: Scherzo Capriccioso, performed by Berlin Philharmonic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU4vdh74VCM
For Herbie and the Berliners on YouTube you really can’t beat the Henri-Georges Clouzot film of Beethoven 9. It has the feel of a Riefenstahl. Serves the purpose, for me at least, of reminding me to be fearful of cultures making great romantic art at such a scale. Gives me the creeps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3MVY6UiMag
Interesting times indeed with an obviously demented President who has plenty of time to Eff things up before 1/20/25.
I have dealt with senile dementia, the petulance and lack of impulse control of those so afflicted are difficult to deal with at best.
The Biden Family needs at least two pardons and a lot of $, they have a big carrot to offer the Cackler, incumbency.
However, they need Joe to go along…and keep going along.
And there’s also the issue of how trustworthy Harris is, once she gets what she wants she has no incentive to keep her end of the deal.
Interesting times indeed.
We have probably already surpassed 2023’s wildfire acreage burned in Cali, as a new conflagration that only started yesterday north of Chico has already torched 45,000+ acres with scant containment, and we are barely into what used to be considered the ‘fire season’.
https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2024/7/24/park-fire
Here in Sonoma County it is tinder dry and the same can be said for Marin County which hasn’t had a big fire since 1928.
It is going to be a horrific fire season throughout the West and we may well lose a mid size city.
If you needed one more reason to build a Corsi box Wildfire smoke should provide it no matter what part of the USA you live in.
I am more worried about the possible death toll. Don’t forget all the windy, narrow one or one-and-a-half car lanes, often with a sheer hillside on one side, threaded throughout Mill Valley and West Marin. There are choke points throughout much of southern Marin Country. The fools insist on having their homes nestled among the untrimmed forest brush with no efforts at fireproofing.
It looks wonderful, but much of the housing range from over a century ago as summer cottages to midcentury modern with no thought to fire survivability. Midcentury modern housing is particularly open to quick, catastrophic fires. Yes, much of it is redwood forest, but that just means that some of the trees will survive.
When you think about most of owners are of the professional managerial class, it does show how foolish our governing class is especially as they fight as a group any fight mitigation efforts including controlled burns.
Garland Nixon talking with Scott Ritter and Andrei Martyanov, streamed yesterday. utube. ~1hr 36+ minutes. The most interesting part starts at ~minute 46.
IMPENDING DOOM – THE END OF UKRAINE – SCOTT RITTER AND ANDREI MARTYANOV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=SKAPd3ALf4Y
What would be really interesting to watch would be Glenn Diesen talking with Jens Stoltenberg and Andrey Martyanov. Somehow I doubt old Jens would be game, though.
The era of privatisation is nearly over. But cleaning up the mess left behind will take years – Guardian
The NHS wasn’t mentioned once in that article.
It’s like those headlines claiming neoliberal economics was near over.
how about bill clintons and albert gores re-inventing government, what a mess.
Re: US markets suffer worst day since 2022 as Tesla and AI stocks fall FT
Here in the lazy days of deep summer confusion reigns. For the past two years big tech and semiconductors for artificial intelligence have been seen as the only island of safety. Two weeks ago the Consumer Price Index came in low, which indicated that the Fed must cut rates within the next few months. The FOMC, which meets on Wednesday, will probably not cut rates at its July meeting. The expectation is that the FOMC will cut rates by one-half percent at its September meeting.
When the CPI number came in two weeks ago, the market dumped semiconductors and bought the rest of the economy as if it were Morning In America. A rate cut of one-half percent in September will not save us. The Morning-In-America trade will end in tears.
Hmm, they’ve signalled that any cuts will be gradual and 25 bps at a time. A half percent (50 bps) would mean something went very badly in the markets/economy between now and September.
>Elon Musk obeisance to Netanyahu
I wonder what Bibi has on Elon that he deems it necessary to make comments like below and attend what will certainly go down in history as one of U.S. Congress’s most despicable show of cravenly worship of Thanatos. It’s ironic and fitting that he is being skewered on TwitterX. It’s unfortunate that he controls a platform that is the most popular forum to keep up with developing news, even if coverage is just topical.
The US Democratic Party has become “openly anti-Semitic,” SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed, after Democrat lawmaker Rashida Tlaib called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal” during his address to Congress.
https://www.rt.com/news/601656-democrats-antisemitic-elon-musk/
Something tells me Elon wouldn’t be the toughest blackmail/honeypot target
One thing I’m really curious about is, did anyone really pay attention to what Biden had to say the other day? I was hoping that there’d be some comments here or in the podcast sphere about it, but nothing. I suppose the BBC article pretty much sums up what I was thinking: he didn’t say anything that anybody was interested in. Oddly, he didn’t look too obviously unwell (which raises more questions). A lot of stuff that are significant because they didn’t get brought up….but no one seems to have anything to say about this. Any thoughts on this front?
TBH the whole process seems to have been memory-holed in UK media. All the people I listen to (but diplomatically don’t engage with) around here who have watched the UK MSM say “We are the Borgala. You will be assimilated. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance by the MAGAs is futile”.
I jest but nobody shows any awareness of how badly she did 4 years ago, that laugh, etc. TDS is in full flow. It doesn’t help him that I watched some of his most recent clips and he doesn’t seem to have pivoted half as well as he seemed to do just a year or so ago. Maybe I’m just too tired to seek out the blogs that have shown his better moments but it all seems a bit weird – esepcially when the Guardian (of all newspapers) had a piece interviewing younger voters who said stuff like “at least the Dems have gone from 0% chance of winning to 30%”. If that’s the Guardian’s chant then there’s a disconnect somewhere.
I’ve largely disengaged and say nothing to people here. Frankly this whole last few weeks defies prediction so I just won’t bother.
>>I jest but nobody shows any awareness of how badly she did 4 years ago, that laugh, etc.
Granted, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with a close view of Kamala Harris’ career, but she has been in government and politics for over two decades and shown no real abilities except for her staff having a high turnover rate.
Really, the only reasons I have heard for her being elected is that she is a woman of color and since California is mostly a one party state, that was enough. Being good looking and saying all the right buzz words also helped.
She stank at all the positions she had. It not that hard to find out about what she actually did with a little digging, which means that people do not care to know. This really will not end well.
There is a big difference in slant between The Mail and the Guardian reporting on the “Pakistani guy kicked in head and stamped on by police in airport video” story. In a reversal of times past, the Mail is more sympathetic to the victim.
I’m not sure why half the Guardian story is discrediting the victim’s lawyer. Since Rusbridger went they really have been awful.
I’m very interested to see how Starmer navigates it. My instinct is he’ll talk about processes and investigations and not much more. Maybe both sides it a bit. Protect the state at all costs.
I can’t remember seeing filmed British police brutality of this nature before. Social media discourse about it is naturally an AstroTurfed racist cess pool.
Given the amount of fake tan they put on Biden, face and hands, he must be ghostly white underneath.
Re: Behavior Beats Intelligence. Duh. Kinda like “It doesn’t matter what you say, it’s what you DO that counts.” Sheesh! Did none of these financial geniuses have mothers?
We’re losing Jasper:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/wildfire-that-roared-into-jasper-was-a-wall-of-fast-moving-flame-says-fire-official-1.7274825